Just when I thought Academia couldn't sink any lower.

[Imnobody4]

Not just a PhD in wanking, but a peer-reviewed paper on masturbating to images of young boys. Published in "Qualitative Methods". t.co/L3MnSkYQFN

twitter.com/ProfAliceS/status/1556584749447143425?t=v_5NNIZDXKNzFbMBZxWsfQ&s=19

How did this get past Manchester University's ethics process @OfficialUoM ? Masturbating to images of children and writing it up for public consumption does not seem ethical to me. This is hugely disturbing.

Actually I'm speechless.

It looks like this is published work from his masters (not at Manchester).

Oh what the ‘winning’ project was…

We had to create artwork for some event or other. I persuaded everyone to close their eyes and imagine it for themselves. I waffled on about ‘see in your minds eye the most amazing canvas - imagine the colours and the brushstrokes… the composition is completely in balance… feel the emotion of the subject… bla bla bla’.

dammit I could have been the next Damien Hurst with that…

Yes, I’d not done any work on the project.

Emperor's New Clothes revisited.

I actually really like that idea. It has promise.

This man lives in Manchester, he confirms in this video.

And this film he made confirms he is aware of the illegality of the shota magazines.

The whole university should be shut down. Obviously not an academic institution.

There was a documentary about Goldsmiths years ago. One of the students there crapped on a table and said it was their project. Another copied a known artist and submitted the emails from that artist complaining as their final year project.

That is a direct rip off of Piero Manzoni.

www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/manzoni-artists-shit-t07667

1961 - I guess we just don't use a tin anymore.

My understanding was that the article was based on his personal experience 🙄 and didn't involve other people (hence my comment that he probably didn't need to go to an ethics committee). However, the question about whether the journal should have checked the legality of the material he used is I think very important.

Most journals are signatories to COPE

publicationethics.org/about/our-organisation

There seems to be so much about plagiarism and falsifying data but nothing about submissions that are based on indirect exploitation of others.

I wonder if this is the avenue through which we should complain?

Seems like academic twitter are finally catching up with this story.

twitter.com/r4dyc/status/1556888873698938880?s=20&t=7GJ_wLspjI1fb2kzE-eFQQ

Quite a few international academics are saying they are either going to complain or have already written to the journal to ask for some kind of statement or investigation.

One academic on twitter (can't remember who she is now) pointed out that this phd student has the same name and might be the same person who received a huge amount of criticism in the past for running a magazine called Destroyer.

There's a whole wikipedia page about the controversy over this magazine as its subject was adolescent boys.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyer_Magazine

If that is the case then you wonder why Manchester University and his supervisors didn't do some basic research into who they were offering phd funding to.

Oh, my!

"The films that are called ‘barely legal’ feature men dressed as boys,” says Andersson, 36. “I find it quite uninteresting. It’s just drag. The models in Destroyer are well under 18.”

www.out.com/entertainment/2012/01/09/destroyer-sweden-zine-teenage-boy

This man should have been arrested by now, yes?

He is very definitely very open with his sexual proclivities towards underage boys. I'm normally a big defender of academic freedom but he goes far too far and I am honestly, surprised, yes, that he has not been arrested either here or in Sweden.

Linking the Karl Andersson who published 'Destroyer' :

In this 2012 interview, Andersson, publisher of Destroyer, discusses Berlin, where he lives.

'...Germany, where Andersson now lives. “It’s more fun!” he says of Berlin, his adopted home city.'

www.out.com/entertainment/2012/01/09/destroyer-sweden-zine-teenage-boy

This academic profile shows he studied in Berlin from 2018-10-01 to 2020-10-01 | MA (Visual and Media Anthropology)

orcid.org/0000-0003-0069-8683

Not conclusive, but it seems quite likely that they are the same person.

And here's a thesis/paper written on 'Destroyer' magazine. It's in Swedish but the keywords themselves deserve a content warning for CSA:

su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A198151&dswid=-5556

Ah, here we go:

filmfreeway.com/KarlAndersson

'Karl Andersson is an ethnographer with a master's degree in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin. He has a background in journalism and publishing. Karl is currently doing a PhD at the University of Manchester.'

It's the same person, I'm sure of it.

'“Destroyer” always remained firmly within the boundaries of the law, which has been confirmed officially several times. As Andersson lived in Prague at the time of publication of the first issues, someone had filed a complaint with the Czech embassy in Stockholm; subsequently he had to report to the police in Prague. After a short interview and after studying the material the police officers said the case was closed and they’d found nothing wrong. The police even stated that they didn’t understand why anyone would file a complaint on the magazine, “but I suppose the reason must be homophobia.” Later, when Andersson lived in Berlin but still had “Destroyer” printed in the Czech Republic he was also once stopped at a routine check at customs, but again they found nothing wrong with the material.'

www.gay-news.com/article04.php?sid=3412

It’s not true that you don’t need ethical approval for research involving documents rather than people. The sensitivity of the topic and the social impact matters considerably too. As it should.

And he did talk to people. Talking to people about their master story habits and preference for cartoon CSA images within that is a subject that screams maximum level of ethical scrutiny!

TBH I think this is past 'ethical approval' and into police territory.

And he does say in a recent youtube that his current project failed ethics approval.

I do wonder WTF the editor dealing with it was thinking in accepting that paper. And the two reviewers.

Kate Moles is the editor in chief for Qualitative Research apparently. I would imagine she’s got a lot of emails about this.

It was first published in April. It probably says something about Qualitative Research as a journal that people are only picking up on it now.

That twitter feed from academics discussing this is interesting.

I was wondering how long they were going to faff about using long words until someone mentioned the word paedophilia and mentioned the illegality of viewing child pornography (/sexual exploitation) in the UK.

It's criminal not just unethical.

Took a lot longer to use the p word than good old MN, but finally someone mentioned it and one brave academic mentioned how queer studies can be used a cover for normalising paedophilia.

Good for that academic. Can we have some more plain speaking please?

Most of my friends are academics but I do have sympathy with those who don't want to fund universities and academic research when illegal research that harms children (anything that normalises sexualisation of children is harmful to them) is funded and supported within the structures and we're several months post publication before anyone's gone 'what the holy fuck?!'

Can the police please check the hard drives of everyone involved (and no, 'it was research' doesn't matter if it's illegal).

There seems to be so much about plagiarism and falsifying data but nothing about submissions that are based on indirect exploitation of others.

This is horrifying. Surely there must be some standards around this?

It probably says something about Qualitative Research as a journal that people are only picking up on it now.

It's a relatively highly ranked journal.